TS Game Engine

Oh my goodness, I wrote an entry before this but when I went to publish I clicked Add Entry instead which doesn't add the current entry but tries to add a new entry. Why does a button that allows you to add a new entry come up when you are already at the page adding a new entry. GOSH. But really just my idiocy in not saving a draft.

Anyway this entry is mostly about my game engine, but contains a little bit about Elma and my Flash Engine as well.

Now my Game Engine isn't just being made on it's own, I am creating a simple Minecraft Clone to develop it's features with. Hopefully this will give the engine a base to work from when it's finished.

A quick overview of things working at the moment are:

Meshes, however no loading can occur I created a helper function to create a coloured plane. A mesh can be compressed into another, currently using it to combine meshes that won't be moving as they end up being on the same matrix. I am also not using faces\indices at the moment.

ShaderManager - At the moment only handles one shader, but I will change that soon.

A world class, currently it is used for easily creating windows and GL contexts. It also has a state manager and it allows my main to look like this:

The world class is kind of a specific thing for me and will hole and make it easy for a user to add things to physics and renderer.

Simple matrix class - Missing a lot of functionality.

Simple vector3 class - Missing a bit of functionality.

Simple quaternion class - Missing a bit of functionality.

Camera - It uses deprecated functionality though, simple fix but it's 2:40 AM. (Wow it took me a long time to write this, it's now 3:14 AM)

So I decided I'll start with a base performance and measure how much adding certain things decreases or increases performance over time, should be fun!

Click images to see full size.

So to begin, my first test is rendering 6400 planes, they are all static and are compressed into one mesh so I am basically doing one draw call: (I will probably make something to wrap this up, so I can individually remove mesh data for removing blocks and stuff)

With an FPS 1300:

On my 5800, so it's not really surprising, but I can't wait until I add texturing.

Things I want to work on next in no order:

Texturing - Got some of this going, Image loading (Only modified RAW images, to contain alpha) but have to add the GL texture stuff and shaders, shaders are very new to me only having worked on them for this project so lots of learning!

Camera - I already have a camera that can do any kind of control, it's just using deprecated GL functionality, remove that and it will be up to date.

InputManager - Have this design all done for Windows.

GUI - This will be kind of easy, just a plane in an ortho view, although the texturing needs to be done. I already have the design of this ready, I coded the GUI for Brains in Ogre3D and will just copy that, just removing Ogre3D stuff. Only thing I didn't do in that GUI was the animated GUI items that came from the sides and top, Michael did those. Funny side note on that: Guys for other teams at QANTM worked on GUI the entire time and it took me a week to code ours, although they were able to have gifs or spritesheets for GUI items and had loading bars .

Picking - To remove blocks.

Lighting.

After that, the simple part my MineCraft clone will be done, although I expect all these to probably take a LONG time.

Quick Elma update, I have a component game visual working, it's basically a map of a part name to a gamevisual e.g. "leftleg",tentaclelega or "abovehead",devilhorns. This allows me to have characters made up of multiple sprite sheets that can also separably change their colour keys. Character customisation should go with the full customisation of abilities we are allowing in Elma and you will be able to customise these:

Left and Right, Leg, Arm, Foot, Wrist, Hand - Have a tentacle left arm and a normal right arm!

Chest

Waist

Shoulders

Neck

Head

Hair

AboveHead - For devil horns etc.

BackLeft - For wings, capes.

BackRight

Eyes will just be changed using colour keys and can be a part of the head!

Here it is kind of in action, I am drawing my own sprites at the moment so don't laugh!

The guy I am drawing, waist, left leg and left foot are separate.

The guy in the top left of the flash player, minus the stick figure which is what I was using first my drawing skills have gone up considerably since I started! I'll put this up when I have two characters finished and you will be able to mix and match between those two.

Only problem so far is that the animations for a component game visual is that it can't have animations where parts overlap, because the depths my be completely wrong, however I plan on making a new animation data class that specifically caters for this and will adjust depths of images in a game visual during animation. Should be cool.

An idea I have also had for my FlashEngine is a resource manager, which will allow me to have images accessed from URL through a database, this will allow me to add more characters and things without embedding more things in flash I'll probably also do this for maps and things, just not abilities and AI because that would severely limit them.